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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24649516">everyone thinks that we're perfect (please don't let them look through the curtains)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mars22/pseuds/mars22'>mars22</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>hoping for the best, but expecting the worst [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Stranger Things (TV 2016)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, but i love the wheelers sm, so here's 3k about them :), this is kinda all over the place</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 03:07:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,351</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24649516</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mars22/pseuds/mars22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>left with little other options, mike and nancy find comfort in each other after starcourt</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Mike Wheeler &amp; Nancy Wheeler</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>hoping for the best, but expecting the worst [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779046</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>35</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>everyone thinks that we're perfect (please don't let them look through the curtains)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Nancy’s room feels like a graveyard.</p><p>She never brought herself to take down any photos of her and Barb, the guilt eating her up everytime she thought about doing it. It felt like a betrayal, to be the reason she died in the first place (indirectly or not), and then to take down any evidence of her existence from her bedroom. So the photo booth and Halloween pictures lay there, like an obituary. She also had her ballerina necklace in her jewelry box, a relic from her relationship with Steve. He got it for her on their first date, one week before...everything. She knew, logically, that he did that for every girl he went out with; bought them some form of relatively cheap jewelry, something from the clearance aisle at the locally-run store that had shut down after Starcourt, but something about it was special to her. Maybe it was because of the longevity of their relationship, maybe it was because of the attention to detail he had, knowing that she had been a dancer in elementary school, or maybe it was the same reason that the photos of her and Barb from the eighth grade still hung on her wall. Guilt. Now, walking back into her room now, after watching the Byers and El drive away, the things of Jonathan’s gave off the same energy to her. It felt like she was walking through a museum of the last two years, of everything that went wrong over that time.</p><p>(Staying with Steve instead of going with Barb. Getting wasted at Tina’s party. Hopper dying and, subsequently, Jonathan moving away. To Illinois. Six hours away.)</p><p>She ran her fingers over the photos he had given her that hung on her wall: Ones of her, ones of scenery, ones of them together. They were beautiful, always had been, but now they haunted her. Nancy wished, more than anything, to have Jonathan with her right now. To have him hold her from behind like he always did, to sway to soft music. Jonathan, always a fan of the Smiths, had been very into How Soon is Now recently, and so Nancy had a growing affection for it as well. They would often dance to it in early summer days or on weekends. It was sort of becoming their “song”.</p><p>Nancy dug the tape out of her closet, where she kept all of her tapes, and popped it in now. She laid down on the top of her bed, curled up, and imagined Jonathan was with her until she fell asleep, tear tracks drying on her cheeks.</p><p> </p><p></p><div>
  <p><br/>---</p>
</div><p> </p><p>Mike was numb.</p><p>He hadn’t been lying all those times when he told her, told everyone, he couldn’t lose her. Couldn’t physically handle it. The first time, it wasn’t this bad. People always say you look back and see things better than they were, but his wasn’t the case, and he knew it. He knew that the pain he had felt then, though objectively heavy and hard to manage, to understand, was nothing compared to this. It was probably because he had only known her for a week, when she had disappeared into oblivion. It was probably infatuation, curiosity of a person who had been hidden away most of her life, someone who had come into his life and then saved it in a whirlwind of a week. He hadn’t really known her and, to a twelve-year-old kid, there wasn’t much to know. She didn’t have a favourite song or a favourite TV show, a favourite subject in school. But to Mike, now nearly fifteen, he knew that there was more to a person, and there was more to El. Before she told everyone a brief telling of the story of her mom back in July, she had told him, tears running down her face and heartbreak painted clearly all over. She told him some details from her childhood and the things she did while she was hidden away with Hopper. And she also had a favourite song, TV show, and subject.</p><p>(They were, in that order, Summer of ‘69 by Bryan Adams, All My Children, and math.)</p><p>And, even though he loved getting to know her and watching her develop as a person, all those reasons made it so hard to watch her leave now. Before it was hard and difficult to understand, yes, because he was young and infatuated and curious, because he didn’t understand why his first crush was a girl with a shaved head, why he was suddenly so upset that she was gone. Now, it was like a punch to the gut. It was like someone was tearing his guts out, by hand, one by one. And all he could do was stand back and watch the tires kick up the gravel road that lead to the Byers’ house, just like he had the last time. He was breaking, tearing at the seams, and he knew it. He loved her, and she loved him, and yet she had to leave. Move away, to a foreign state that even he had never been to, on a scary new “adventure”, as Joyce liked to call it.</p><p>The first person to move after Jonathan and Will turned around the corner was Nancy. Time seemed to restart when she sighed, like a rude awakening from a dream. Only this wasn’t a dream, couldn’t have been, but instead a waking nightmare. Reluctantly, Mike picked up his bike from the Byers’ porch (could he even call it that anymore? It was already sold, and they had moved away, so it wasn’t theirs anymore, technically).</p><p>(Still, it hurt to realize that there was another family moving in. Another family that would make breakfast in the kitchen and sleep in the bedrooms, ignorant to the fact that Mike had made some of his best memories on the very places on which they stood. They would trample all over them, dig them into the floor until they were gone, like they had never been there in the first place. Like the Byers never were.)</p><p>He took one last glance as he swung his leg over the bike seat. It still hadn’t fully hit him, the fact that he would, most likely, never be allowed in that house again. And even if he were, for some random reason, it wouldn’t look the same. It wouldn’t smell of cigarettes and dust, and his girlfriend wouldn’t be sitting on the couch, awaiting his arrival.</p><p>They biked home in silence. What was there to say? They all had to go to school on Monday and pretend like nothing was wrong. Pretend to be unaware that El was in a new school, where she didn’t have the comfort of her friends to help guide her through the day, to show her the ropes. Pretend that their lives hadn’t just been flipped upside down, no pun intended.</p><p>By the time he got back to his house, Nancy was upstairs blaring the same song she had what felt like every day since May, “How Soon is Now”. Mike was getting tired of it, but he couldn’t bring himself to care at the moment. No, all he could think about was how much he missed El. Her big smile, her curly hair, everything. And, apparently that was painted all over his face, judging by the way his mom looked at him when she walked in. She set down her knife, and pursed her lips sympathetically.</p><p>“Oh, honey,” she said , coming from out behind the counter island. Mike walked towards her numbly, and she outstretched her arms to him. Even though he was much taller than her now, he felt like a little kid again, running inside with a scraped knee.</p><p>“It’ll be okay, Mike,” she said into his ear, and it was something about the way she said it, the soft motherly tone or the fact that she rarely called him “Mike” these days, but the cord inside of his chest finally snapped. He kicked himself for being a little kid, for not acting his age, but he finally let himself choke out a sob.</p><p>And, suddenly, he was right back where he started. In his mother’s comforting grip, crying because he lost the girl he loves.</p><p> </p><p></p><div>
  <p><br/>---</p>
</div><p> </p><p>Nancy misses the way things were.</p><p>Not even just with Jonathan, although she does miss that. But with everything: the way her parents used to at least pretend to love each other, when her best friend was alive and she didn’t have all this trauma. She misses sleepovers in her room, looking at pictures of Tom Cruise and Danny from Grease with Barb, fantasizing about having boyfriends and getting married. She misses playing softball, like she used to when she was little, in between dance recitals.</p><p>One day, when she’s particularly sad and listening to her radio, she thinks she pinpoints the exact day she wishes, ever so desperately, to go back to, the last day that everything was normal and “perfect”: the day Holly was born.</p><p>It was the last time that she can remember that her family felt like a family. Her dad bought her mom lilies, her favourite flower, and she and Mike sat out in the waiting room with their grandparents, holding hands while her mom gave birth. Then they all gathered inside to meet her for the first time. Holly Grace Wheeler. She remembered her mom saying it like it was yesterday, all wistful and soft, staring down at her baby daughter like she was an angel. Sometimes, she wondered if that’s how her mom said her name for the first time when she was born.</p><p>
  <em>Nancy Elizabeth Wheeler. </em>
</p><p>But she knew that probably wasn’t true. Her mom had never had the same affection for her and Mike as she did for Holly. Maybe it was because, ever since she was born, her husband had stopped trying and so did her kids, and so all she had left was Holly. Baby Holly, who still looked up at her mom like she could realign the stars like it was nothing. No one else looked at her like that anymore. Not her dad, or Mike, or even her. They weren’t a family anymore. But also, on some other level, Nancy wouldn’t trade what she had now for the world. Of course, there was so much she wishes she could take back: Barb’s death, of course, Jonathan moving away, breaking Steve’s heart, but at the same time, she loves the new “found family” she has. She loves Joyce, who makes her tea when she gets caught sneaking out of Jonathan’s room and helps her study (because, as much as her life is going kind of terrible as of late, Joyce is really smart). She loves Robin, who gets her free movies at the video store now, and is kind of her new best friend since Steve graduated and Jonathan moved away. She loves El, who is so kind and lovely it makes her heart burst. It hurts her heart that she was imprisoned and abused her entire life, but she was doing the best she could, just like everyone else was, to make sure that El lives a good life with people who love her now, even if that just means tutoring her when she had a spare minute, back when El lived in Hawkins, or making her her first glass of hot chocolate.</p><p>She loves Murray, as kind of the weird uncle she never had. She loves him for getting her and Jonathan to admit their feelings and for helping them get justice for Barb, despite the whole giving-teenagers-alcohol thing (but it wasn’t like she never had it before, anyways). She loves Max, who is quite possibly the sassiest yet funniest person she ever met, as she learned over the summer. And, after everything, she feels kind of closer to Mike in a way. They finally have something they share, that they connect over, even if the thing they connect over is shared trauma.</p><p>And somehow, she thinks, this is better than her real family ever was, anyway.</p><p> </p><p></p><div>
  <p><br/>---</p>
</div><p> </p><p>He doesn't quite know why he goes to Nancy. After Lucas joined the JV basketball team, they're not really on speaking terms anymore, and it's pretty much just him and Dustin. On this particular day, however, Dustin is working on an English project with a girl in his class. Mike is missing El just a little bit harder, and figures the only person who could really understand, and is likely available, is his sister. So he finds himself in the hall outside his sister's room, knocking.</p><p>"Come on in," she says, sighing.</p><p>Her room is airy and smells of sweet perfume. The walls are papered with a darker purple than they were when she was growing up, a decision she made shortly after New Year's in 1985. But they're still plastered with all of her old pictures and posters, something that comforts Mike even though this room and those memories were never his. Nancy's room has evolved over the years, for sure, but he's in there so rarely he can't really notice most changes, and it always feels like he's nine and rushing in to ask if they can borrow her radio for a campaign whenever he comes in.</p><p>"Hey," he says quietly, realizing he has no real purpose to being in here. He leans against the door frame, fumbling with his hands awkwardly. "I- Do you wanna do something?"</p><p>"Together?" Nancy asks. Mike's sure she's not trying to be insulting; they obviously never hang out, but it still kind of hurts that she's that shocked at the idea of spending time with him.</p><p>"Yeah. All my friends are busy or -- you know -- in Illinois, and I just wanna -- I dunno, go for a drive, or something."</p><p>Nancy takes this in, seeming to realize <em>go for a drive</em> means<em> distract myself from going crazy</em>, and sighs again. "Yeah, sure. Just let me brush my hair, and I'll meet you in the car."</p><p>Ten minutes later, they're aimlessly driving around the outskirts of Hawkins in silence, save for the radio, playing that stupid Smiths song again. Mike's foot is bouncing anxiously below the dash, and Nancy's thumb taps the steering wheel as she shoulder checks far more often than she needs to. It's definitely a product of everything they've been through, all their trauma, but neither of them mentions it. They don't even really notice the signs anymore -- why would they need to? It's obvious why it happens and how they got there, and there's not real point in dwelling on it too much.</p><p>"Jonathan said they're trying to get down here for your birthday," Nancy said suddenly, braking gently for a stop sign. Mike jumped halfway out of his seat. "It's supposed to be a surprise, but I just figured -- you could use some hope, right? We all could, if we're being honest."</p><p>Mike's birthday was over Spring break, just like always. Him and El had been hoping, and planning, but it was still up in the air if Jonathan could get a long enough break to drive down. The fact that they were close -- close enough for Nancy to say, for Jonathan to mention, was huge.</p><p>"And you shouldn't get your hopes up, because he still has to confirm with his boss, but -- it's looking good."</p><p>Mike suddenly had a giant grin on his face. He turned to his sister, who was also smiling, even if hers was a bit smaller than Mike's. Hope fluttered in his chest, and he would dream of seeing El for many nights to come.</p><p> </p><p></p><div>
  <p><br/>---</p>
</div><p> </p><p>That plan eventually fell through, much to Nancy's dismay. She knew she shouldn't have mentioned it to Mike, because now he was extra disappointed that they couldn't make it. He carried his sadness everywhere, and it was so evident it broke Nancy's heart. This would be the first time he ever had a birthday without Will, and she knew how much this meant to him and El, too. She knew she had to come up with a plan to help him get there (of course, her helping him meant she could see Jonathan too).</p><p>And so, before the sun rose on his birthday, she snuck into his room and packed him a bag for about a week, not knowing how long they'd be gone (his birthday was always at the start of Spring break, just days after Will's, so she had to be safe in case they stayed right up until school started again). She got him whatever clothes she found in his laundry hamper, his Walkman with a couple tapes, a book, and toiletries from the bathroom. She packed herself a bag too, loaded up the car, and wrote a note to her mom before she woke him up.</p><p>If this was a normal day, she would probably resort to shaking him until he woke up, but he always shouted when she did that, so she had to use simply her words.</p><p>"Mike," she said. "Mike, get up." Nancy nudged him ever so slightly. He finally stirred, swatting away her hand.</p><p>"What do you want?" he mumbled angrily, still half-asleep. "It's still dark out."</p><p>"We're going to Illinois," she whispered, and immediately he shot up.</p><p>"We are?"</p><p>"Yes, get dressed," she whispered hurriedly. "I already have the car packed, hurry up before we wake up Mom and get caught."</p><p>"She doesn't know?"</p><p>Nancy looked at him like he was stupid. "You really think she would let you leave her custody on your birthday? Don't be dumb. Ms. Byers knows we're coming, anyway, so we're not surprising <em>her</em>."</p><p>Mike sighed. "Are you sure about this?"</p><p>"Do you want to see El or not?"</p><p>That seemed to shut him up. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, rubbing his eyes. "Just... gimme like ten minutes. I'll meet you down in the car."</p><p>Nancy nodded and tiptoed away. "Don't do anything loud, like brush your teeth, we'll just get a stick of gum at the gas station."</p><p>"Yeah, yeah, whatever."</p><p>It took him fifteen minutes to make it down to the sidewalk (seriously, he was always such a princess about how he looked). Nancy had expertly parked the car a couple houses down so their mom wouldn't hear them pull away. Mike still looked dead tired, but she could tell he was trying to hide his excitement. They may not spend a lot of time together, but she had still spent eighteen years of her life living with him, and she knew him well enough.</p><p>"Happy birthday, by the way," she said, smiling as the engine turned over.</p><p>"Thanks, Nance."</p><p>After they got gas and snacks for the road, they remained mostly quiet, save for Mike asking Nancy how long they had left in their trip everytime he woke from a nap. At around 10, Nancy started to get worried that their mom had called Ms. Byers and ordered them home right away, but she figured that was a problem she couldn't exactly fix while driving down the interstate.</p><p>Right before noon, they finally pulled up to the house. It was big by their standards; two storeys and fancy brick. Mike sat up and pulled his Walkman off, staring up at the house he hadn't seen since November.</p><p>"Does El know we're here?"</p><p>"Just Jonathan and Ms. Byers, I think," Nancy said, switching the car off and stretching. Mike leapt out of the car, throwing his stuff back on the seat and abandoning his clothes in favour of running to the door to see El and Will.</p><p>"I'll get your stuff, don't worry Mike," she mumbled to herself sarcastically. But when she looked up at the from door and saw him hugging El just like he had in the Byers house nearly two years ago, she doesn't really mind.</p><p>Nancy figures that she was right, that day back in her room. This found family is better than the one any of them were given in the first place.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>title is a lyric from "dollhouse" by melanie martinez.<br/>the wheeler family is genuinely my favourite dynamic on the show, so i felt i had to write something about them. this feels inconsistent, but i wrote most of it back in march and so i have no idea where i originally wanted it to go. i feel like i could've written more, but i also feel like i got the point across; nancy and mike are hurting, and so they go to each other.<br/>you can also find me on tumblr under mikewhecler :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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